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The Smiling Nationalist

2013

Fall Issue

August 21, 2013

Don Terry

Video blogger and Internet sensation Ramzpaul delights white nationalists and racists but calls himself a satirist

Ramzpaul is the funniest white nationalist in the room. Admittedly, there’s not a lot of competition for the title. That is precisely why he should be taken seriously. He’s blazing a trail. With a small camera and a big grin, the lanky, bespectacled, 50-year-old father of two from suburban Tulsa, Okla., has emerged as the hottest right-wing video blogger this side of former Klansman David Duke.

His real name is Paul Ray Ramsey and his hundreds of snarky YouTube videos — “mostly mocking the establishment’s religion of Cultural Marxism” — have racked up nearly 5 million views in the last four years. He has his own YouTube channel, boasting advertising and almost 13,000 subscribers. He has become a hero to many on the radical right. His liberal-loathing, feminist-bashing, racial separatist-supporting videos, typically three to five minutes long, have become a weekly staple on major white supremacist websites, including Vanguard News Network and Stormfront.

“Ramzpaul is smarter than most of the other white pride types on YouTube,” Canadian marketing consultant Sarah Welstead, who blogs about marketing and pop culture, wrote last year after discovering him when she “fell down one of those YouTube rabbit holes.”

“He positions himself as a ‘satirist,’ doesn’t spew hate speech indiscriminately, and has closed down the comments on most of his 481 videos,” Welstead continued, “so it takes a few minutes to figure out that he is in fact a racist who is quite popular on Stormfront discussion boards where they like the fact that his pro-white message is subtle enough to reach his fellow nationalists without us non-racists getting upset.”

Ramsey is now up to more than 600 videos or vlogs — the name for a video blog. “I wrote the blog post because I was kind of shocked that YouTube was actually running ads on his stuff,” Welstead said in an interview with the Intelligence Report.

Ramsey declined to talk to the Report. In a recent video, he said the Southern Poverty Law Center, its publisher, was “basically a domestic left-wing terrorist organization.” He guards information about his personal and professional life closely. “I get some mean letters,” he told a right-wing radio host. He said he doesn’t want his family to be collateral damage. When another far-right interviewer introduced him by his real name, Ramsey quickly corrected him, saying he prefers to simply go by Ramzpaul. “It’s kind of like a one-word name thing,” he explained, “like Cher, Madonna, Elvis — Satan.”

The Coming-Out Party

Although he advocates seceding from the Union and establishing a new, 90% white nation — a 21st century Fantasy Island he describes as representing traditional American demographics — Ramsey insists he is not a white nationalist or a supremacist. “I don’t call myself a white nationalist,” he told a radio interviewer not long ago. “I call myself a nationalist who is white.”

While he has been making videos for years, his debutant ball was in early April at Montgomery Bell State Park outside of Nashville, Tenn., at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference, attended by more than 150 white nationalists, many of whom play the popular white nationalist semantic game: You say racist, I say racialist. Although Ramsey was a first-time speaker at the event, he was given star billing. A photograph of him smoking a fat cigar was featured in conference advertising. His “iconoclastic show,” a flyer declared, “has been described as ‘Pop Culture Meets Nationalism.’”

Ramsey’s talk at the conference, called “Sex and Nationalism,” was essentially an attack on feminism mixed with high school-level racist jokes, delivered with a smile, always with a smile to show he’s just a satirist (so loosen up, he’s just mocking the establishment). Welstead, the marketing expert, said Ramsey seems to be betting that calling himself a satirist “gives him a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Indeed, he once told a radio host, “If you say you’re for something — but not really — it’s a way to get around some of the censors. The censors don’t really know how to deal with it.”

His video called “Support Marriage Equality” is a good example of his bait-and-switch technique. It starts out like a plea for tolerance and acceptance: “Guys, it is time to stop the hate. Just because someone loves different than you does not give you the right to hate them.” The video quickly turns, however, into a mocking tale of Ken, a “zoo sexual,” who dies after having sex with his partner — a horse.

“What do you think a kid would rather have: a daddy and a mommy, or a daddy and a pony?” Ramsey asks, looking into the camera. “Only daddy can ride the mommy.”

Ramsey told Maggie Roddin, host of the right-wing radio show “Unsolicited Opinion,” that his role models are the TV comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. “I know they’re left-wing,” he said, sounding apologetic as he quickly added that he admired their style, not their substance. “I try to do the right-wing version of what they do.”

Colbert and Stewart’s jobs are secure. At the American Renaissance conference, Ramsey’s biggest joke was: “How do you tell if a white supremacist agrees with you? They say K-K-K.”

As for feminism, Ramsey told the audience, it is “a disease.” This time he was not joking.

“What is the cause?” he asked. “It is the delusion that the sexes are equal. It is the mother of all delusions.”

Although he has an adult daughter, a chemical engineer who he says he is “very proud of,” Ramsey has said in the past that feminism is part of a Cultural Marxist “anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian” plot and it is turning white men into “wussies” and “wimps.” At the conference, Ramsey essentially said the plot is succeeding. Feminism, he said, has populated America with submissive men who women don’t care to marry or have children with. “We need more growth in white children,” he said, and white “secession.” If not, “Men’s rights will end. Christians will end. White conservatives will end.”

Afterward, John Derbyshire, a British-American journalist whose racially charged writing got him fired last year as a contributor to theNational Review, gushed about how much fun he had at the conference. In a dispatch for Taki’s Magazine, a website published by Greek-born journalist and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos, Derbyshire wrote, “A disproportionate amount of the fun was provided by vlogger Paul Ramsey, whom I recommend for consideration when your next corporate function, birthday party, or bar mitzvah comes around.”

In an E-mail interview with the Intelligence Report, Derbyshire described Ramsey’s work as “often clever, short videos mocking the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and totalitarian ruthlessness of the Cultural Marxist establishment — you know, people like [Southern Poverty Law Center founder] Morris Dees.”

Funny or Degenerate?

Tim Wise, a well-known white, anti-racist activist based in Tennessee, first became aware of Ramsey’s work in 2010. Ramsey did a video ridiculing Wise’s angry and frustrated response to the Republican Party taking control of the House of Representatives that year. Since then, Wise has watched a “smattering of his videos.”

“He’s quite a bit funnier than David Duke,” Wise told the Report. “He doesn’t have the neo-Nazi background that Duke has. He’s very similar to Jared Taylor.”

Wise said Ramsey and Taylor are among the eggheads of the white nationalist movement, particularly Taylor with his master’s degree in economics and fluency in French and Japanese. “When it gets down to it,” Wise said, “there are a lot of these Nazis who hold the cerebral ones at arm’s length and have never trusted them. Taylor is not trusted. He doesn’t talk about the Jews.”

Ramsey doesn’t either, at least not directly. He told an interviewer that if someone uses the N-word or the J-word on his website, it is deleted.

“I’m not sure Paul is sure who he is trying to appeal to,” Wise said. “It looks like he’s still trying to figure it out. It’s clear, though, he’s trying to conform much more to the Jared Taylor style. And if anyone is paying close attention, I don’t think there is any doubt that Taylor’s methods and approach are the most effective and dangerous.”

While Ramsey’s videos are indeed popular on Vanguard News Network and Stormfront, ideological purists are always lurking. In one of his videos, Ramsey called an Asian TV actress cute. The blasphemy sparked a Stormfront forum thread that ran on for 26 pages. It was called “Ramzpaul is a degenerate.”

Here’s a small sampling:

Blaidd Drwg: “I just lost respect for him because he’s open about an attraction to non-whites. How would you react if a WN [white nationalist] woman said she found black men attractive?”

Haus Drachen: “Personally, I don’t think it’s natural to find people of another race attractive.”

Nachtmahr: “I don’t think he’s a degenerate, but I think he is gonna lose a lot of his fans if he keeps saying that he finds chinks attractive, especially as he is a WN.”

SnowWhiteQueen: “If you white men don’t see the obvious problem with a white guy praising the beauty of non-white women then you need to get your head out of your behind.”

Rebel Redneck 59: “Talk about ‘hot’ Nonwhite women HAS NO PLACE ON A WHITE RACIALIST FORUM. None. Don’t you realize that such talk implies this forum is full of hypocrites?”

Declaration of Anger

Most of Ramsey’s ideas for videos come straight from the headlines. In May 2012, he uploaded a gem to YouTube called “Happy Trayvon Martin Day.” It was his sarcastic response to an elementary school in Washington, D.C., that dedicated a day to the slain Florida teenager. Ramsey donned a black hoodie like the one Trayvon was wearing the night he was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, or, as Ramsey described him, a “brown, white Hispanic.”

Ramsey, looking into the camera, a large white cross superimposed in the background, says, “God sent his son Trayvon Martin to Florida” so his suffering and death would wash away the sins of white racism and privilege. He recites a prayer, asking Trayvon for forgiveness. Then he crosses himself in the name of “Obama, Trayvon and Al Sharpton” and gives the camera a two-hand middle-finger salute.

Ramsey also keeps a close eye on the headlines and videos coming out of Europe. He seems to have been so impressed by a video produced by a group of young, white, angry French nationalists — Generation Identitaire — that he made his own middle-aged, white, angry version, in an example of white nationalist globalization via YouTube.

The French nationalist video is called “A Declaration of War — From the Generation of National Identity.” The group is militantly anti-Muslim.

“We are the generation of ethnic fracture, total failure of coexistence, and forced mixing of the races. …

“Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. …

“We will not back down, we will not give in. ...

“Don’t think this is simply a manifesto.

“It is a declaration of war.”

Ramsey’s version is called “A New Declaration of Independence.”

“We are the Americans who get attacked by flash mobs because of our race.

“We are the Americans who have experienced the lies of diversity and forced integration. …

“We are the Americans who have experienced the damning of our history, of our culture, of our nation.

“We Americans reject the politically correct lies you have placed in our children’s history books.

“We have stopped embracing or celebrating your notion of diversity. …

“Our nation is our people, our identity, our blood. …

“We will never back down and we will never give in. …

“This is our new declaration of independence. …”

“I’m not sure Paul is sure who he is trying to appeal to. It looks like he’s still trying to figure it out. It’s clear, though, he’s trying to conform much more to the Jared Taylor style. And if anyone is paying close attention, I don’t think there is any doubt that Taylor’s methods and approach are the most effective and dangerous.”

The 1%

Ramsey posts new videos to his YouTube channel every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He told a fellow-traveler interviewer that vlogging allows him to bypass what he said Hillary Clinton called “the gate keepers.” It’s also fun, he said, even though he said he’s making only a few bucks from his videos. “I can say whatever I want — within limits,” he said. “I have to get around the censors.”

He is obsessed with what he calls Cultural Marxists — i.e. liberals, Democrats, black U.S. presidents. Ramsey said he supported Mitt Romney in 2012, because “it would be nice to have an American as president.”

One of the greatest Cultural Marxists of all time, according to Ramsey, is Norman Lear, the creator and producer of, among other television hits, “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking 1970s sitcom about the foolishness of bigotry. In a radio interview, Ramsey said Lear “was able to get Cultural Marxism into the mainstream through shows and comedy and culture, to make things funny.”

“The problem with a lot of nationalists I see,” he continued, “is they’re always serious. They’re intelligent, but they’re not interesting for most people to watch.”

Over the last couple of years, Ramsey has told right-wing interviewers that he has always been conservative. He subscribed to the National Reviewwhen he was 12. He said he loves books written years ago, such as H.G. Wells’ history of the world, published in the 1920s, “because that was pre-political correctness.” In the 1990s, he joked, he was a member for a short time of a “hate group, the Republican Party.” But he said he always tells people now, “I don’t belong to any movement.”

His nationalist vlogging career began by accident in 2008 when he made a YouTube video for his brother living in California. His brother also makes videos, not about nationalism but about carpentry. Ramsey’s electronic postcard was supposed to be a snarky but personal family update. When Ramsey posted it, however, he forgot to mark it private and several strangers watched it and commented on it. To his “astonishment,” they liked it. And they wanted more.

He said he then started making videos about his take on the news and posted them to a website called Liberty Forum, now defunct. Word began to spread about the funny nationalist, or “smiling Nazi” as one anti-racist described him.

He started out using a small, inexpensive Flip camera. He now uses a $500 camera, but there is nothing flashy about his videos, usually shot, it appears, from an office in his home. Most of the videos are Ramsey simply talking and grinning into the camera. He often begins with a friendly “Hey guys” and ends with “Talk to you guys later.”

“I am the 1%,” he says near the beginning of a video that sums up his put-upon worldview.

“I have paid over a half a million dollars in taxes in my lifetime.

“I am the 1%.

“My ancestors built America from a wilderness into a vast civilization.

“I am the 1%. ...

“I do not apologize for being a man.

“I wish people Merry Christmas, not a Happy Holidays.

“I am the 1%.

“I have never apologized for my race.

“I am the 1%. …

“I am opposed to Democracy.

“I am the 1%.

“I believe the top 1% of humanity pulled the rest of the 99% of humanity out of caves and darkness. …